Some Bootable CD's not booting

[bluestrobe]

My wife's computer booted up to a corrupt file in windows XP. So I tried booting off of the original XP cd to get to the recovery/repair console and it wouldn't boot off of it. So I try a backup CDR I had, same thing. I replaced the optical drive and no change. I tried it with a memtest86 bootable cd and it just locked the system up while decompressing the kernel. However it can boot off of a Kubuntu CD and a BartPE CD I have just fine.

All CD's work fine on two other computers. The replacement optical drive came out of my working computer and worked fine. The problem system has a cheapo MSI motherboard/vga combo with a generic power supply, Pentium D and 1gb of RAM.

My idea is the motherboard is screwing up somehow, any ideas or suggestions?

 

[mpilchfamily]

In case you didn't know you have to go into the bios on some motherboards and set the optical drive as the first drive the system should try to boot from. Most are defaulted that way but some times they are set to go strait to the HDD or someone changed the setting. So make sure that its set to boot fromt eh optical drive.

 

[Roguestar]

On a lot of systems you can also get to the main boot menu by pressing F10 or something like that as the POST screen comes up. It'll say something like "press F2 for BIOS, F10 for boot menu". Then select "CD-ROM" and you're grand.

 

[bluestrobe]

Sorry, I guess I forgot to mention it after looking at my OP. I did set the optical drive as the first bootable device AND also selected it from the "POST boot menu" to boot up as the first bootable device. Same issue persisted.

I decided it was the motherboard after running memtest86 for 12 hours with no errors. No way to test the CPU directly (ran burn in for 4 hours without issues) so the motherboard was the next culprit. It was a cheapo system anyways that did it's duty.